HELP FOR SIGHT LOSS PART 1

Losing your sight can be the most life changing experience you will ever go through! Some people cope with the news they will go blind really well. Some people don’t find out until it’s too late. Others like me who are / were in total denial, end up visiting every emotion possible to the human body. For me, fear and the knowledge that you must go on in life but also know that you can’t face the darkness. I was not expecting my fate the morning I woke up blind was more than a devastating shock to me. I had been told from the age of four that I would be blind. Imagine, four years old to be given such news? I witnessed the Doctor each time we visited the hospital reducing my poor Mum into the saddest and most tearful thing I have ever seen. This has long effects on a child so young, as does the fact that a man can hold so much evil power over a helpless lady who would never hurt anyone or anything in her shortened mapped out life.

 

I say my Mums life was mapped out, because I believe she was meant to take me from the foster home at the age of four weeks for a reason. That reason was to fight for my sight. She sacrificed everything in her life to try to find a cure or at least some treatment for me.

 

I was not to be blind. Blindness was not spoken about in our family. Saving my sight was the only language. To lose my sight would be the impossible. So, when I was just turned 30, with a one year old baby, my Husband at work and I woke with the sounds of my baby shouting Mama, my nightmare began.

 

Now what to do?

1. Who can I tell?
2.  What questions should I ask?
3.  How can I find out phone numbers to call? I can’t see my phone book. I can’t take numbers
4. Who would change my baby’s nappy?
5. Who would feed him?
6.  How could I clean my house?
7.  How could I cook for my Husband?
8.  How could I sort out the colours for washing clothes?
9.  How could I iron?
10.  How would I know who was standing at my door?
11.  How could I read letters/birthday cards/Christmas cards?
12. I couldn’t write and didn’t know Braille. How was I to write?
13. I would never see flowers again, colours or the Television
14.  My wedding photographs were bits of paper.
15.  The most painful thing, I would never see my only child’s face again.
16.  I wouldn’t be able to teach him to read, write or take him places
17.  I wouldn’t see the sun again, a snowflake or raindrop.
18.  What would be shiny? Dull? Sparkly?
19.  How could I see to live?
20.  How could I breathe normal again?
21.  How could I hide with a baby?
22.  I wanted to run away, but how could I?
23.  How could I die, leaving my child without his natural Mother, just like me when I was born? I knew the personal effect that it all had on me, never really belonging with anyone or to anything.

 

Grasping onto anything or anyone who would help me. But soon learned that the help I needed was not out there. I was on my own. I had to teach myself as much as I could until I was ready to face my destiny.

 

The first major problem was times. How could I tell the time? I mean, before it was easy, I looked at the clocks in my house. I looked at my watch or turned on the TV and pressed the green button and read the time. Newly blinded without whispers of wisdom? Time was even before sticks, poles and shadow clocks, so without measures on the pols and sticks, not seeing shadows, how could I tell the time?   

 

In 1714, the British parliament offered an award, to anyone who could invent an accurate clock, for navigation, for use at sea. Thousands of sailors died because they were unable to find their exact position because the exact time was needed to find longitude and pendulums would not work at sea.

 

Sailors would be lost at sea, crashing against rocks. Well, I was crashing against my own rocks and I was a ghost. That is how I felt. No one could see me. No one heard my cries. Voices walked by me, feet stamped hard on me and the weight of life crushed me against a brick wall I couldn’t clime over.

 

I was laughed at rejected swallowed up for breakfast and spat out over dinner. Doctors thought of my terror a joke and teachers from my child’s school as he grew older spoke to me like I was a bad pupil.

 

I had officials telling me it would be impossible to look after my child so someone would visit me for the duration of my child’s youth.

 

I collected enough strength to tell the officials to go to hell.

 

After all, I was my child’s Mum. And nothing they did helped me. They set fire to my kitchen one day leaving me in the house with my baby and a fire. Flames I couldn’t see. Just could hear, crackling in the corner of my room.

 

Fighting the flames, I managed to make the scary sound go away. Then the start of my revenge grew stronger.

 

I’m still looking for that cure now. I still dream to see. I live for the news on our TV one day to announce the cure of stem cell treatment. But now I wait a winner. A saviour. Against all odds, I brought up my child as I have learned so many blind people do. Some have help from family; others like me don’t have any help at all. I taught my Son to talk walk read and write. To play and draw to laugh and learn. And for the past five years, I’m now on another journey. Living with my husband of four years this June, a blind person has been since birth. He is a professional. I’m still learning. He still struggles and gets frustrated, as do I, but now, I have learned, we can do almost anything. Cleaning I was doing days after I lost my sight, I hated it, dusting nothing. Holding ornaments that I chose once with such pride. Meant nothing now. Cooking I also did as my x husband worked at three jobs, so I was the housewife.

 

Now my second Husband and I go out into the big bad world, and it is a big bad world, full of cruel people, but you know what? There are also a lot of wonderful people and we meet them each week. They may not be our families, or even friends, most time strangers and in my case neighbours. But they are out there.

There are products to tell the time, white canes to find our way with the help of people who work to show blind people routes.

 

I find most help, excluding technology, the sugar in our cake, but the icing on the top of the cake, is  ourselves.

best help of all, is us